Blogs have evolved a bit over the past 20 years or so, and diversified. The always terrific Ben Werdmuller here makes the distinction between thinkpieces (what I tend to think of as vaguely equivalent to keynote presentations at a conference, less than a journal article, but carefully composed and intended as a ‘publication’) and weblogging (kind of what I am doing here when I bookmark interesting things I have been reading, or simply a diary of thoughts and observations). Among the surprisingly large number of good points that he makes in such a short post is that a weblog is best seen as a single evolving entity, not as a bunch of individual posts:

“Blogging is distinct from journalism or formal writing: you jot down your thoughts and hit “publish”. And then you move on. There isn’t an editorial process, and mistakes are an accepted part of the game. It’s raw.

A consequence of this frequent, short posting is that the product isn’t a single post: it’s the weblog itself. Your website becomes a single stream of consciousness, where one post can build on another. The body of knowledge that develops is a reflection of your identity; a database of thoughts that you’ve put out into the world.

This is in contrast to a series of thinkpieces, which are individual articles that live by themselves. With a thinkpiece, you’re writing an editorial; with a blog, you’re writing the book of you, and how you think.“

This is a good distinction. I also think that, especially in the posts of popular bloggers like Ben, the blog is also comprised of the comments, trackbacks, and pings that develop around it, as well as tweets, pins, curations, and connections made in other social media. Ideas evolve in the web of commentary and become part of the thing itself. The post is a catalyst and attractor, but it is only part of the whole, at least when it is popular enough to attract commentary.

This distributed and cooperative literary style can also be seen in other forms of interactive publication and dialogue – a Slashdot or Reddit thread, for instance, can sometimes be an incredibly rich source of knowledge, as can dialogue around a thinkpiece, or (less commonly) the comments section of online newspaper articles. What makes the latter less commonly edifying is that their social form tends to be that of the untarnished set, perhaps with a little human editorial work to weed out the more evil or stupid comments: basically, what matters is the topic, not the person. Untarnished sets are a magnet for trolls, and their impersonal nature that obscures the individual can lead to flaming, stupidity, and extremes of ill-informed opinion that crowd out the good stuff. Sites like Slashdot, StackExchange, and Reddit are also mostly set-based, but they use the crowd and an algorithm (a collective) to modulate the results, usually far more effectively than human editors, as well as to provide shape and structure to dialogues, so that dialogues become useful and informative. At least, they do when they work: none are close to perfect (though Slashdot, when used well, is closer than the rest because its algorithms and processes are far more evolved and far more complex, and individuals have far more control over the modulation) but the results can often be amazingly rich.

Blogs, though, tend to develop the social form of a network, with the blogger(s) at the centre. It’s a more intimate dialogue, more personal, yet also more public as they are almost always out in the open web, demanding no rituals of joining in order to participate, no membership, no commitment other than to the person writing the blog. Unlike dedicated social networks there is no exclusion, no pressure to engage, no ulterior motives of platforms trying to drive engagement, less trite phatic dialogue, more purpose, far greater ownership and control. There are plenty of exceptions that prove the rule and plenty of ways this egalitarian structure can be subverted (I have to clean out a lot of spam from my own blogs, for instance) but, as a tendency, it makes blogs still very relevant and valuable, and may go some way to explaining why around a quarter of all websites now run on WordPress, the archetypal blogging platform.